Plus OPENDORK.. If you have a fledging project you’d like to get feedback on, a dorky event on the horizon, or something else strange and involving electricity you’d like to talk about for 5 minutes or so, then let us know at the start of the event.

Thanks to the CCI Exchange, University of Leeds for financial support for this event.

Still no dorkbotsheffield scheduled (soon!) but there’s loads of other strange and unmissable electrical goings on in Sheffield, leading us bravely into the winter of 2013. Here’s a selection:

12th-13th October, Access Space host the Soundbox Workshop with Derek Holzer. It seems to be full but there might be a backup list.. Better get on the Access Space announce list anyway, they’re on fire at the moment!

Thursday 24th October, Terre Thaemlitz’s Soulnessless: Cantos I-IV, Showrooms. A audiovisual performance-lecture by Thaemlitz on identity politics and media production, informed by her long experience in the New York house scene. Part of the ongoing Refract series challenging the conventions of electronic dance music culture.

Tuesday 5th November — The second installment of computer club. Their first event was great including an extensive set from the legendary Black Dog.

Wednesday 6th November, the Sheffield Hallam “curated by” series continues with a stunning line up of artist and designers talking about their work.

On Thursday 7th November The dorkbot-affiliated Algoravecomes to Sheffield, it’s live generative music but you can dance to it (if you have had enough tequila).

Saturday 9th November (evening), another Refract evening, this one featuring a human reconstruction of the Roland TR-808 drum machine, which has provided the mechanical structure of so much classic techno.

Saturday 30th November, The last in the series of Refract events, featuringMark Fell, who has been releasing massively influential abstract electronic music, pushing the limits of perception.

Friday 6th December, Open Platform at Access Space, doing strange things without electricity – the fourth in the Open Platform series of post-digital performance art events.

Talking of Black Dog, great to see they met their KickStarter target. If you want to support another local maker initiative, check out the Infinite Crypt miniatures game architecture project by Access Space’s James Wallbank.

Add a comment if we’ve missed anything and we’ll add it straight away!

Plus! An exciting paper-based auction! Have a look between talks, and up the bids. All to help launch an urgent Access Space fundraising drive. If you’ve got some interesting bit of kit you have lying around, why not bring it along and add it to the auction? Pledged so far:

For those new to the international phenomena Dorkbot, each meeting consists of around 3 presentations by “people doing strange things with electricity” – a purposefully loose definition for what you might call electronic or digital art. People come to dorkbot because they’re an engineer who wants to be an artist, or an artist who wants to be an engineer, are something in between, or otherwise interested. It’s free entry and beer is always available.

Raspberry Jam is also the same time and night as dorkbotsheffield this month, so we’re having an informal hangout together. They’re just down the road, upstairs in the Workstation (conference room 2), and will be doing various experiments with the Raspberry Pi, including with sensors, motors, steppers and servos. This is a bit of an experiment – we’re not sure exactly how this will work – but but feel free to move between the two events, and we will all end up in the same pub at the end.

Be sure to let us know if you would like to present something at a future dorkbot!

Dorkbotsheffield#6!

When: Friday 3rd August, 2012 from 6pm (Access Space) / 7pm (Site)
Door tax: Free entry, refreshments available
What: Another healthy evening of presentations and demos by people doing strange things with electricity, this time across two venues. You’d be welcome at either, but why not come to both?

We start at Access Space (3 Sidney Street, S1 4RG) for a dorkbot prelude at 6pm, to visit their current artist-in-residence:

Refab Space artist in residence, the Juneau Brothers (Juneau Projects and Joseph Welden), will discuss their latest project and the materials, technology and techniques behind it. They’ll give an overview of what the group does and where the residency idea comes from.
The Refab Space houses a laser cutter and other equipment for creating a host of two and three dimensional objects. The residency involves creating sculptural midi controllers from, audio triggers and circuits boards for live performance. You can get hands on and try out the new instruments too.

Then we stroll a few metres down the road to Site gallery (1 Brown Street, S1 2BS) by 7pm for more:

Susanne Palzer will talk about switching electricity off and going on in context of her interest in ‘performing technology without technology’. Following a period of R&D and the project RAM/RAR/RAA+RAP(s) – A Random Process Experiment at Access Space she will present recent findings: how she uses electricity for research and to learn about technology, her attempts to translate what she has learnt into physical performance – e.g. an ‘analogue hack of presentation software’ – and the temptation to switch electricity back on and use altered software in the future.

Alex McLean will talk about Live Coding, using programming languages to make live music. Alex has been writing software to make music to drink beer to for over ten years in Slub, succeeding in making rooms full of people dance to algorithms on several occasions. He makes increasingly broken techno, writing code live in self-built languages. Lately he has been collaborating with Jake Harries to make statistically improbable pop music as Silicone Bake. Alex will talk a bit about how live coding has developed over the past ten years, show some of the live coding environments he has made, and look to a future of interactive programming languages based on visual and tangible interaction.

The megadork was a huge success, thanks to everyone involved including the excellent presenters, the fantastic comperes Holly Rogers (from Science Brainwaves) and John Moseley (from Access Space), producer Richard Bolam and sound engineer Paul Blakeman who kept our strange things working lovely, and of course lovebytes for bringing everyone together and making a fantastic festival.

This was our second dorkbotsheffield event, and everything was
in a fixed width font for some reason.

Dorkbotsheffield#2 featured four strange dorkbot presentations
involving electricity in some way, in particular:
-> IAIN SHARP talking about his legendary arcade machines including
CYCLEPONG and his mechanical remake of LUNAR LANDER
http://lushprojects.com/
-> JO ARMITAGE showing her HANDMADE MUSIC INTERFACES, in particular
a neat touchscreen arduino hack and a melodica style app.
-> BEN DORNAN talking about his experiments in MIND CONTROLLED
MUSIC, which may require some explanation. Luckily, he sent this
info:
"While it may not be the most obvious pairing, for over 50 years
composers and scientists have been probing how the brain can be
used to create and manipulate music. Over time this has developed
from simple sonification to complex control systems, and has
moved from the lab into the home thanks to consumer grade EEG
technology. An outline of this progress will be traced, along
with a demonstration of how accessible the technology and
techniques have become."
-> JAKE HARRIES will be walking round the corner from his base in
Access Space to talk about the ZERO DOLLAR LAPTOP project.
Here's some info from Jake:
"Zero Dollar Laptop Workshops have been running in London since
January 2010, the first project was with St Mungos Charity for
the Homeless in London. We recycle computer hardware and install
Free and Open Source Software to build media laptops and create
music, graphics and video for distribution over the Internet."
http://www.furtherfield.org/zerodollarlaptop/http://www.access-space.org